Petal Crash 2 is out in Early Access, with online play still missing
GalaxyTrail's block-throwing puzzle sequel arrived on Steam in Early Access on September 29 after a long and openly difficult development. Online play, the new Adventure mode and bonus characters are not in it yet.
Petal Crash 2 is playable. Friend & Fairy's puzzle sequel, published by GalaxyTrail, went up on Steam in Early Access on September 29, and it picked up its first patch on October 1.
What Early Access includes
The developer's own announcement sets expectations directly: Early Access carries a comparable amount of content to the first Petal Crash, and the biggest new features are not ready. Online play, the new Adventure mode and the bonus characters are all still to come. What is in now is Arcade Mode, a run of versus matches against the whole cast with dialogue snippets between fights and a hidden extra challenge for players who do well enough; all four Score Attack modes from the first game - Time Trial, Turn Trial, Trash Trial and Chain Trial - with Master and Grand Master ranks; local two-player Versus with board sizes up to 9x9, up to six block colours and new kinds of garbage; and an expanded Puzzle Mode in which every puzzle has a goal to meet and can carry a rule that fails you if you break it.
A difficult development, said out loud
The announcement is unusually candid about the wait. "We're obviously way behind schedule - there were a lot of challenges and unfortunate circumstances that slowed development a lot," the developer wrote, declining to go into detail, before adding: "we never gave up." The game itself is set in the fantasy land of Florea, where seven magic flowers each found their way to an ordinary person with a dream.
The first patch
Version 1.0.1, posted on October 1, reworks two puzzles in Lilibri's puzzle map to teach their lessons more clearly, replaces one that duplicated another's lesson with a new puzzle called "Nowhere to Run", adds unlockable title components while replacing some unintended duplicates, fixes spelling errors in titles and dialogue, stops the cursor getting trapped on the Puzzle and Treasure Garden boards when cursor wrap is disabled, keeps keys such as volume controls from counting as "any key", and fixes the Steam Deck virtual keyboard not applying a player name at first boot.
Why it matters
Petal Crash's throw-and-match twist has a small but committed following, and an Early Access launch that says plainly what is missing is a better deal than a full release that quietly ships without online play.